• by Danielle Oster , July 29, 2025

Spotify wants audiences to get as excited about summer reading (via audiobooks) as they do about the season’s biggest songs.

The streaming service launched an international, cross-platform “Read Like You Listen” campaign promoting the range of audiobooks available on the platform. A hero video, running on connected TV the U.S. and Canada, focuses on a pair of men driving around on a summer day -- an unlikely looking duo to be listening to the audiobook for Sarah J. Mass’s romantasy title “A Court of Thorns and Roses,” which topped Spotify’s Global Audiobooks of the Year list for 2024.

Six additional short-form videos will run across online video, digital OOH, and paid social, expanding the campaign’s reach to Germany and the U.K, while also running in the U.S. and Canada. Each ad showcases an audiobook title, including Stephen King’s “Never Flinch,” Cixin Liu’s ‘The Three Body Problem” (also adapted into a Netflix series), and BookTok sensation “Atmosphere: A Love Story” by Taylor Jenkins Reid. The campaign also includes a series of curated audiobook playlists on Spotify, and an overview of seven titles on Spotify’s “For The Record “ blog.

Spotify has been investing in its audiobooks offering for several years, and the campaign arrives as the streaming service introduces new subscription plans expanding access to its library of over 400,000 titles.

“Superfans are everywhere, and not just in music,” Spotify Chief Business Officer Alex Norström said during an investor call today to discuss the company’s Q2 earnings report, which saw the company’s stock tumble after failing to meet Wall Street’s revenue expectations.

“Right  now, we are in market with an audiobook add-on subscription, which…does two things: It takes better care of the demand from our super fans on books, and it's enabling access to audiobooks for our family plan sub accounts as well, which we haven't had prior.”

During the call, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek also discussed the company’s approach to marketing spending, stressing that investors should be prepared for Spotify to prioritize the long-term health of the business over the impact of short-term spending increases.

“One of the ways we measure marketing is SAC [subscriber acquisition cost] to LTV [lifetime value] ratio,” he said. “And so you could imagine the SAC to LTV, if it's 2:1, it will elicit one type of response from Spotify. But let's hypothetically say that it will go to 5:1, meaning for every dollar we invest in marketing, we get $5 back. If you're an investor, you should feel very happy for us to invest [even if] that means that we will have short-term impacts on expenses for that.

“More and more of advertising is becoming programmatic,” he added. “That means that there will be opportunities where, for some reason, people pull back from advertising [and] the prices for marketing comes down, and therefore, efficiency might come up.” That “might mean that even though we generally are trying to become more efficient, we may see in certain quarters where it makes a lot of sense for us to even double or triple our marketing.”